PROFESSIONALS

Stephen Lande, President, is a distinguished international trade expert in the United States. Mr. Lande is Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and has lectured widely in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Mr. Lande has been involved in international trade since the 1960s. He was initially assigned as a Foreign Service Officer to the Economic Bureau of the Department of States and then to American Embassies in Athens and in Luxembourg. He had a twelve year career with the Office of the United State Trade Representative as the Senior Trade negotiator and the first of a long-line of Assistant USTRs. In this role Mr. Lande negotiated many bilateral and multilateral trade agreements on behalf of the US Government in Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

Mr. Lande is viewed by many to be the "Father” of both the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), and an early force in creating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). More recently, he has been directly involved with U.S., Central American and African governments and businesses in advancing the approval of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), improvements to the Caribbean Basin Initiative, the spread bilateral of Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).